It’s not censorship to stop hateful online content, insists UN rights chief
It’s not censorship to stop hateful online content, insists UN rights chief
Social media posts inciting hate and division have “real world consequences” and there is a responsibility to regulate content, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, insisted on Friday, following Meta’s decision to end its fact-checking programme in the United States.
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a belief held by most reasonable people and only opposed by Nazis
So the ACLU are Nazis now?
i mean they've historically defended nazis yes
That doesn’t make them Nazis. It makes them defenders of free speech.
Free speech protects unpopular speech. Popular speech doesn’t need to be protected.
This isn't about free speech. This is about amplification and publication of speech.
You can say whatever you want, but we shouldn't guarantee you a megaphone to say it.
The platform isn’t the megaphone. That’s the algorithm.
If you’re wanting their access to platforms limited, I’d like the know where you draw the line. Are they allowed to text hate speech to each other? Publish their own email or print newsletters? Should we ban them from access to printers (or printing press while we’re at it)? Should they be allowed to have hateful conversations with large groups of each other?
That's up to the owner of the megaphone.
If the megaphone owner doesn't want you to use it, create your own.
And there’s the expected bootlicking. You went from complaining about who gets access to the megaphone, to openly praising government censorship coordination.
Maybe if you want more censorship so bad, you should take your own advice and start your own platform.
Sorry, I was busy gagging on a boot or I would've responded sooner.
The rise of fascism across the United States is partially because they've been allowed to coordinate, and are public and loud with their normalization of hate.
Free speech absolutionists quickly run up against the paradox of tolerance. And at that point you get to choose. Do you want the most tolerance society or do you want full freedom of speech?
If you think you want full freedom of speech, then you don't understand how people will abuse that to take it away from you anyway.
No, fascism is on the rise to power because it has the financial backing of capitalists who are trying to counter the rise of leftism in the broader population. And you are being a “useful idiot” by helping them to establish the political and systemic tools to snuff out contrary speech under the guise of fighting the fascism they are in reality entrenching with those powers.
If you think you can hand the rich & powerful the power to limit speech, and that it will be used by them to limit the very speech they are funding, you are seriously not paying any attention.
Barriers to entry and the first-mover advantage make that impossible.
Only if you have a profit motive. Otherwise Lemmy wouldn't work
no it makes them defenders of nazis. if youre at a table with ten nazis, youre at a table of eleven nazis
So you’re an authoritarian bootlicker who can’t tell the difference between defending free speech vs spouting hateful speech.
I’ll defend a Nazi’s right to say their hateful shit. I’ll also gladly plead guilty to an assault charge over beating their ass for it.
They shouldn’t fear the government for their speech. They should fear physical retaliation from their community.
That's the problem with the internet, really. You can't punch these a-holes through your monitor or keyboard. The consequence here is moderation instead of physical violence. Removing these people from their platform is the punch in the nuts that they deserve. It's still free speech because these are non-government websites.
Edit to make it less mean sounding.
Exactly, which is why this should be handled by the platforms as they choose instead of by government requirement. If you don't like how a platform moderates content, don't use that platform.
Considering this moderation is often done in cooperation with government censors, and the executives working at these platforms are often former government, the lines are blurred enough that I don’t support it.
We need more legal blocks to prevent the government from getting around the constitutional protections by coordinating with corporate third parties.
Like so many others, you've mixed up general society with law enforcement. We defend the right for the Nazis to say their piece without being imprisoned. Running a business profiting from letting Nazis publish their speech is a choice, and not a necessary one. Using and supporting the social relevance of a social network that voluntarily publishes hate speech for profit is a choice, and not a necessary one.
Sounds like you’re the one mixing it up.
And that's exactly what the user you're replying to has been saying all along.
This post is about the UN, as in, a governmental authority. The whole discussion here is that moderation isn't something for the government to do (outside of prosecutable crimes), it's for private entities to do. Meta can moderate its platforms however it chooses, and users can similarly choose to stop using the platform. Governments shouldn't force Meta to moderate or not moderate, that's completely outside its bailiwick.
Meta pushes opinions, advertisements, and engagement. The government can and should regulate their bullshittery. Our privacy has been violated along with our rights.
Your view of these platforms and what they do is completely disconnected from reality. They are advertising platforms that are used to influence elections not a "platform for speech".
You can't ignore the reality of what they have already done and we are past pretending it is in any way altruistic.
There is no moving onto other platforms when they they use their profits to buy up all their competitors. You can look at the current dating site situation to see how without government regulations monopolies have formed.
Your hands off approach is unetainable and also ignores that other free countries have things like anti-hate laws and they are doing way better than we are.
The solution is to fix the government and then regulate the hell out of these fuckers. This is the way.
Our privacy has been violated
And we should have laws protecting that. Ideas:
- hold them criminally liable for PII lost in breaches that's not necessary to provide the service (and the customer has explicitly opted in) - they'll be extra careful about what data they hold onto
- require them to remove customer data upon request
- require explicit approval from and compensation for customers when sharing data with another org
pretending it is in any way altruistic.
Why would we pretend that? They're a business and they exist to make money, and it turns out it's profitable to impact elections.
I think this is a symptom rather than the problem. The root is that elections are largely determined by the candidate with the most funding and media exposure, not the candidate with the most attractive ideas. There are a lot of ways to address that, and giving government power (and platforms justification) to silence critics ain't it.
To solve the problem of election interference, we need to get money out of politics. That's hard, but it'll be a lot more effective than regulating something as nebulous and abusable as "hate speech." I say we ban all advertising for candidates and issues within 6 months of an election and force candidates to rely on debates (which would be fact checked; each candidate would select a group). We should also have public funding for debates, where the top 5 candidates who are registered in enough states to win are allowed to debate.
The solution is to fix the government
Depending on your definition of "fix," you'll probably just give ammunition to the next opposition administration. Be very careful about this.
And those that still think fReE sPEECh is an acceptable concept in the modern world?
In what sense is algoritmically-amplified, targeted data transmission speech? It's of a scale that makes it qualitatively vastly different, and its impact has nothing to do with human speech or the press before the time of the internet (with the exception of yellow journalism, and we all know how well that served us).
I defend the right for you to say what you want, with few restrictions. But that doesn't mean you can set up a 250 kwatt PA system outside my bedroom window and 3 AM and shake me out of my bed with the subsonics. And that's where we are with the oligopoly social media providers.
Free speech is absolutely an acceptable concept, but it's merely a restriction on government.
Private platforms are free to drop you from their platform if they don't like your speech, and you can be prosecuted if your speech violates a law (e.g. hate speech). Platforms can also restrict the types of speech allowed on their platforms. None of that is a violation of free speech.
Free speech is only violated if governments place a restriction on the speech itself, or force private entities to enforce restrictions.
but it's merely a restriction on government.
It isn't. Free speech is a right the gov can give you, but it's also just a concept.
Governments don't grant rights, they can only restrict them.
They can recognize them. But nice strawman.
It's not a strawman, it's literally what you wrote.
The Bill of Rights in the US only exists to prevent encroachment on individual rights, they're not necessary in order for people to have them. Arguably, governments only have rights explicitly granted to them, because they only exist due to the people submitting themselves to them.
It's an important distinction, and one so many seem to misunderstand. I'm not saying you do, I'm merely clarifying in case someone else does.
And, in reality, the only rights that remain are those that have been fought for. "Inalienable rights, granted by the Creator" is a lovely concept, but it's not self-enforcing, and as we've seen, rights can be effectively nullified by a corrupt Supreme Court and a fascist legislature and executive branch. OK, you can pretend they still exist in the abstract, but they're de facto gone if state institutions or people power don't defend them.
Agreed. In fact, the whole concept of inalienable rights, specifically the phase "all men are created equal" in the Declaration of Independence, was used to justify the American Revolution. In essence, people are endowed with certain rights from their creator, one of which is deciding which powers to be subject to. If your government doesn't represent your interests, you have the moral right to reject it and seek to replace it with one that does.
So yes, we absolutely need to fight to protect the rights we do have, and reestablish those we lost. Giving up even more rights in the process is counter-productive. We need more movements like the Civil Rights movement to demand change. We've given up too much power to the police, intelligence agencies, and more, and we should absolutely actively resist and demand restoration of our full rights.
It's not a strawman, it's literally what you wrote.
You ignored the point I was making to argue about semantics. Still are. That's a strawman.
And what was that point? My point is that freedom of speech has nothing to do with private platforms.
I stated my point very bluntly in the comment you replied to above. Freedom of speech is not "merely a restriction on government". It is a concept that exists outside of government entirely. And it has everything to do with anywhere speech is expressed, including private platforms.
Rights only make sense in the context of governments, which have the power to strip my rights through imprisonment. I have no right to speech on a private platform or on private property, I am there at the pleasure of the owner. So talking about rights (esp freedom of speech) makes no sense outside the context of government.
That's why I argue that rights are a restriction (or a check) on the power of governments. Only a tyrannical government will attempt to abridge my rights.
Yes, it exists outside of government as a function of your nature, but that means nothing outside the context of an authority with the power to strip it away.
Free speech without consequences is what fascists are after. Free speech is an action to which they want no reaction or even worse when there is a negative reaction (also a desired goal) they will use that to attack the structures attempting to uphold peace.
And it'll only be their speech that's free.
Yes that's why the Chinese are such big proponents of free speech!
Post free speech. They have already finished their objective.
The freedom to speak has nothing to do with being heard.
Ya know I never thought I'd see the day that a marginalized people would protest free speech fundamentally. This is just next level stupid.